Community patches Facebook calendar sync for correct time zones

On June 6, 2009, Palm launched the Pre smartphone on Sprint. On June 6, 2009, legions of new webOS users discovered that events imported from Facebook were at the incorrect time in their phones. At least, they were wrong if you lived anyplace other than the US Pacific Time Zone. Facebook calendar events are stored at your local time, and the webOS calendar and Facebook Synergy never have made the adjustment from Pacific Time to whatever your local time zone happens to be. We don't use Facebook events all that often here (we prefer using Friendster's calendar system), but when we did we couldn't help but scratch our heads when every event was entered late by three hours.

We're approaching three years since webOS launched with this oversight, and while we're not expecting that HP's going to fix it with Open webOS 1.0 (though perhaps they should consider doing so, nudge nudge, wink wink), the webOS Nation community got together and hacked together a patch to fix it without HP's help. Written by webOS Nation forum member Frantid with the testing assistance of HaPe and gizmo21, the aptly-named "Facebook calendar timezone fix" patch fixes the issue by shifting your Facebook calendar into whatever time zone your device has been set into. So if you're in the US Eastern Time Zone, your events will move forward by three hours to the originally-scheduled time. In France? Nine hours forward. Singapore-based webOS users will get their events pushed forward by fifteen hours.

As always, we're inspired by the work done by the webOS community to fix up the OS they love, even with all its faults. Perhaps we love it because it's not perfect and it needs our help. It's like a puppy: adorable and fun to play with, but in need of some serious attention before it can be let out into the world by itself. The Facebook calendar timezone fix patch is available for devices running webOS 2.1 or higher and can be found in the WebOS Internals patches feed in Preware and WebOS Quick Install or in the forum link below. If you're a serious Facebook events users outside of the Pacific Time Zone, we seriously recommend you install it right away.